Paul Gustave
Doré (1833–83), was a French illustrator, etcher,
painter, and sculptor. He was born at Strassburg, Jan. 6, 1833, the
son of an engineer. His talent was very precocious. At the age of
12 he drew sketches for lithographs, and in his fifteenth year he
was regularly employed as an illustrator by the Journal pour Rire,
at the same time exhibiting series of pen sketches in the salons.
He had but little education in art, and the demand for his designs
was too great to allow him the requisite leisure for technical
training. As a caricaturist, he was successful, but he soon turned
his attention to the illustration of books. His Rabelais
Illustré, which appeared in 1854, established his reputation,
and this work was followed by an incredible number of others,
equally famous. He was not only popular in France, but in the
United States and throughout Europe, especially in England, where
there was a Doré cult. He worked with amazing facility and
fecundity, acquiring great sums of money through his art. He was
made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1861 and officer in
1879. He died in Paris, Jan. 23, 1883.

Doré's
reputation as an artist is due to his illustrations, in which his
weird and fertile imagination and his dramatic sentiment had
opportunity for full sway. His drawing, however, is often faulty.
He uses landscape with success, especially in order to obtain the
weird and gloomy effects in which he excelled. Sometimes, as, e.g.,
in his last great work, Orlando Furioso (1880), his imagination
runs riot, and his work becomes exaggerated and bizarre. His chief
masterpieces of engraving, besides the Rabelais, mentioned above,
are Don Quixote (1863) and Dante's Inferno (1861). Among the
numerous other works which he illustrated were Balzac's Contes
drolatiques (1856), Atala (1862), the Bible (1864), for which he
furnished only the sketches, and La Fontaine's Fables (1866). He
illustrated a number of important works of English literature,
among which are Milton's Paradise Lost (1866), Tennyson's Idylls of
the King (1867–68), Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (1876), and
Poe's Raven (1883).

Doré aspired
to be an historical painter and, with his accustomed facility,
created many works, mostly of colossal proportions. In these his
lack of technical training is particularly conspicuous, especially
his faulty drawing and his lack of color sense. The English,
however, made much of his painting, and there is still a permanent
exhibition of his pictures in London. His first exhibited canvas
was the “Battle of the Alma” (1855), and the best of
his paintings are “Francesca da Rimini” and the
“Neophyte” (1868). His large canvases, “Christ
Leaving the Prætorium” and “Christ's Entry into
Jerusalem,” attracted much attention. Doré's landscapes
and aquarelles are worse than his figure pieces. In them the artist
strives after scintillating effects, but shows no real feeling for
nature.

As a sculptor, his
technical deficiencies are even more evident. His best-known work
is the monument to Alexandre Dumas in the Place Malesherbes, Paris.
But he was more successful in a colossal vase, exhibited in the
Exposition Universelle of 1878, and now in Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco. The vase represents the “Vintage” and is
decorated with numerous little figures of geniuses and animals, in
which, in a graceful and delightful manner, the artist has
expressed his exuberant fantasy.

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